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An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

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Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#151

Post by neya »

Springtime wrote: post #5

Ars Technica being caught using LLMs that hallucinated quotes by the author and then publishing them in their coverage about this is quite ironic here. Even on a forum where I saw the original article by this author posted someone used an LLM to summarize the piece without having read it fully themselves. How many levels of outsourcing thinking is occurring to where it becomes a game of telephone.

Ars Technica has always trash even before LLMs and is mostly an advertisement hub for the highest bidder

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#152

Post by snowwrestler »

TheTaytay wrote: post #91
barfiure wrote: post #65

In the coming months I suspect it’s highly likely that HN will fall. By which I mean, a good chunk of commentary (not just submissions, but upvotes too) will be decided and driven by LLM bots, and human interaction will be mixed until it’s strangled out. Reddit is going through this now in some previously “okay” communities. My hypothesis is rooted in the fact that we’ve had a bot go ballistic for someone not accepti…

I think we are about to see much stronger weight given to accounts created prior to a certain date. This won’t be the only criteria certainly, but it will be one of them, as people struggle to separate signal from noise.

Sounds like the sale price for vintage HN accounts is about to skyrocket.

Just kidding! I hope

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#153

Post by eszed »

> This is about our systems of reputation, identity, and trust breaking down. So many of our foundational institutions – hiring, journalism, law, public discourse – are built on the assumption that reputation is hard to build and hard to destroy. That every action can be traced to an individual, and that bad behavior can be held accountable.

This is the point that leapt out to me. We've already mostly reached this point through sheer scale - no one could possibly assess the reputation of everyone / everything plausible, even two years (two years!) ago when it was still human-in-the-loop - but it feels like the at-scale generation of increasingly plausible-seeming, but un-attributable [whatever] is just going break... everything.

You've heard of the term "gish-gallop"? Like that, but for all information and all discourse everywhere. I'm already exhausted, and I don't think the boat has much more than begun to tip over the falls.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#155

Post by _HMCB_ »

sphars wrote: post #142
Springtime wrote: post #5

Ars Technica being caught using LLMs that hallucinated quotes by the author and then publishing them in their coverage about this is quite ironic here. Even on a forum where I saw the original article by this author posted someone used an LLM to summarize the piece without having read it fully themselves. How many levels of outsourcing thinking is occurring to where it becomes a game of telephone.

Aurich Lawson (creative director at Ars) posted a comment[0] in response to a thread about what happened, the article has been pulled and they'll follow-up next week. [0]: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards...

It’s funny they say the article “may have” run afoul of their journalistic standards. May have is carrying a lot of weight there.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#156

Post by ffsm8 »

sho_hn wrote: post #126
Springtime wrote: post #5

Ars Technica being caught using LLMs that hallucinated quotes by the author and then publishing them in their coverage about this is quite ironic here. Even on a forum where I saw the original article by this author posted someone used an LLM to summarize the piece without having read it fully themselves. How many levels of outsourcing thinking is occurring to where it becomes a game of telephone.

Also ironic: When the same professionals advocating "don't look at the code anymore" and "it's just the next level of abstraction" respond with outrage to a journalist giving them an unchecked article. Read through the comments here and mentally replace "journalist" with "developer" and wonder about the standards and expectations in play. Food for thought on whether the users who rely on our software might feel simil…

While I don't subscribe to the idea that you shouldn't look at the code - it's a lot more plausible for devs because you do actually have ways to validate the code without looking at it.

E.g you technically don't need to look at the code if it's frontend code and part of the product is a e2e test which produces a video of the correct/full behavior via playwright or similar.

Same with backend implementations which have instrumentation which expose enough tracing information to determine if the expected modules were encountered etc

I wouldn't want to work with coworkers which actually think that's a good idea though

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#157

Post by epistasis »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #131
epistasis wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes I subscribed to them last year on the strength of their reporting in a time where it's hard to find good information. Printing hallucinated quotes is a huge shock to their credibility, AI or not. Their credibility was already building up after one of their long time contributors, a complete troll of a person that was a poison on their forums, went to prison for either pedophilia or soliciting sex from a minor.…

TBF even journalists who interview people for real and take notes routinely quite them saying things they didn't say. The LLMs make it worse, but it's hardly surprising behaviour from them

It's surprising behavior to come from Ars Technica. But also when journalists misquote it's through a different phrasing of something that Pepe have actually said, sometimes with different emphasis or eve meaning. But of the people I've known who have been misquoted it's always traceable to something they actually did say.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#158

Post by boothby »

sho_hn wrote: post #126
Springtime wrote: post #5

Ars Technica being caught using LLMs that hallucinated quotes by the author and then publishing them in their coverage about this is quite ironic here. Even on a forum where I saw the original article by this author posted someone used an LLM to summarize the piece without having read it fully themselves. How many levels of outsourcing thinking is occurring to where it becomes a game of telephone.

Also ironic: When the same professionals advocating "don't look at the code anymore" and "it's just the next level of abstraction" respond with outrage to a journalist giving them an unchecked article. Read through the comments here and mentally replace "journalist" with "developer" and wonder about the standards and expectations in play. Food for thought on whether the users who rely on our software might feel simil…

I look forward to a day when the internet is so uniformly fraudulent that we can set it aside and return to the physical plane.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#159

Post by klik99 »

Presumably the amount of fact checking was "Well it sounds like something someone in that situation WOULD say" - I get the pressure for Ars Technica to use AI (god I wish this wasn't the direction journalism was going, but I at least understand their motivation), but generate things with references to quotes or events and check that. If you are a struggling content generation platform, you have to maintain at least a small amount of journalistic integrity, otherwise it's functionally equivalent to asking ChatGPT "Generate me an article in the style of Ars Technica about this story", and at that point why does Ars Technica even need to exist? Who will click through the AI summary of the AI summary to land on their page and generate revenue?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#160

Post by helloplanets »

snowwrestler wrote: post #150
retired wrote: post #96

Can we please create a robot-free internet. I typically don’t support segregation but I really am not enjoying this internet anymore. Time to turn it off and read some books.

I don’t know how to create a robot-free Internet without accidentally furthering surveillance of humans. Any technique I can think of that would reliably prove I’m not a bot also seems like a technique that would make it easier for commercial or government tracking of me.

It's not hard to make sites completely antagonistic to LLMs / agentic AI. Even just having the basic Cloudflare bot check filters out a lot by itself.

This is more a case of GitHub as an organization actively embracing having agentic AI rummaging about.

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